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Nature Reviews Nephrology (2022)
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Long COVID, which refers to post-acute and chronic sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, can affect nearly every organ system and all demographic groups. The high and growing toll of long COVID calls for an urgent need to understand how to prevent and treat it. Governments and health systems must address the care needs of people with long COVID.
Shortly after the beginning of the COVID-19 global pandemic, reports emerged showing that some individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 developed persistent symptoms and new health problems that arose long after the acute phase of infection and could not be explained by other factors1. The patient community who, to their credit, first recognized and reported this new syndrome used the term ‘long COVID’ to describe the post-acute and chronic sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection1. Long COVID can affect people across the lifespan — children, young adults and older adults — and across sex, race and ethnicity, and baseline health status2. Importantly, this syndrome not only affects patients who had severe COVID-19, but is also observed in individuals who were asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic during the acute phase of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
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The contents of this article do not represent the views of the US Department of Veterans Affairs or of the US government.
Clinical Epidemiology Center, Research and Development Service, VA Saint Louis Health Care System, Saint Louis, MO, USA
Ziyad Al-Aly
Institute for Public Health, Washington University in Saint Louis, Saint Louis, MO, USA
Ziyad Al-Aly
Division of Nephrology, Department of Medicine, University of Alabama School of Medicine, Birmingham, AL, USA
Anupam Agarwal
School of Primary Care, Population Sciences and Medical Education, Faculty of Medicine, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Nisreen Alwan
NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Wessex, Southampton, UK
Nisreen Alwan
NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre, University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Southampton, UK
Nisreen Alwan
Division of Paediatrics and Child Health, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Valerie A. Luyckx
Department of Nephrology, University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Valerie A. Luyckx
Renal Division, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Valerie A. Luyckx
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Correspondence to Ziyad Al-Aly.
The authors declare no competing interests.
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Al-Aly, Z., Agarwal, A., Alwan, N. et al. Long COVID: long-term health outcomes and implications for policy and research. Nat Rev Nephrol (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41581-022-00652-2
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Published: 01 November 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41581-022-00652-2
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